Doctor_Kumquat

...Kheldarn, you are officially awesome.

*runs off to make macros for his Widow to set her title as either Night Widow or Fortunata Seer, depending on the dual build*

Lots of awesome temp powers like those in Striga can be (re)acquired from Ouroboros, but there are a ton of temps that can ONLY be gained through the real contacts, because they are not part of an arc and provide no badge.

I've seriously considered the idea of rolling a rad/rad defender (or equivalently impressive debuffer) and using an attack chain composed almost entirely of temp powers... my ice/storm controller already does, given how pathetic his actual 'attacks' are.

I have played CoH since beta. For my first year or so of playing, I rolled a ton of alts and didn't play CoH all that much. I lots of school stuff to do, and much of my gaming time was sucked into playing Warcraft 3 w/my friends, so I didn't get anyone higher than 26. Then, I rolled my kin/rad defender right before Croatoa was released, and he shot up into the 40s over the next couple months. I didn't get an actual 50 until February 07 though, after I rolled a Sonic/Sonic defender and joined up with the Repeat Offenders at the end of the previous summer. Since then, I've gotten 4 more to 50, with another 4 so in the upper 40s, half a dozen 30s, and 662 badges on my archer.

When playing up a new alt, I routinely try and do as many of the TFs as possible while I am in the appropriate level range for them. Between TFs, I get as many interesting temp powers and badges as I can; if I SK up with my friends or run MA arcs very often then I outlevel way too much stuff. This is especially problematic on 20-something heroes, with Sister Psyche, Moonfire, Hess, Citadel, the Safeguards, zone arcs in Striga, Croatoa, and possibly Faultline, and a couple fun old stories inbetween like the Freakolympics.

Surveillance is pretty much the only thing that would compel me to take //Munitions other than pure concept. It's a very nice little power. The only serious reason to take Cryo Freeze Ray over it would be that /EM has nothing to hold/immobilize foes with to maximize Ignite. Ignite is no longer as cheaty-awesome now that they pumped up the recharge, but if you still want to do horrible, horrible things with napalm, CFR is your best choice (especially if you take Power Boost to go along with it).

The only Arachnos fort-type place in Port Oakes I could think of would be the ghost-infested one in the NE... no clue if that gives dayjob cred though.

I consider it to be one of the most useless blaster powers in the game, until you get either a crapload of dmg procs into it or Contagious Confusion. At that point, it'd be worth taking; the Contagious Confusion proc makes this power actually useful as a confuse aura.

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I mean, Defender attacks are less powerful than many MINION attacks. That's pretty weak.

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When judging the strength of the attacks, you have to look at their efficiency when fully slotted with SOs, if not their potency after your (de)buffs. Neutrino bolt may look wimpy compared to some minions' blasts, but not a lot of minions out there can match a slotted bitter ice blast to the face. Defenders with primaries that cannot augment their own damage do feel slow, because if a FF/Elec was given the damage to rip things apart solo with ease, then those that can buff their damage would obliterate everything, and if defenders got an across-the-board damage buff, then we'd be stepping on Corruptors' toes even more than we do now. (For reference, defs have a .65 ranged dmg mod, corrs have .75 and scourge)

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My issue with Vill badges is simple...getting ones you missed. Now blue side, you hit Oro and its simple. Red Side tho...if you don't have a contact unlocked, you apparently can't Flashback their mishes. And if your level is high enough, whichever contact unlocks the one you need won't give you mishes anyway.

THAT is a headache.

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The unlockable contacts that you need a badge for can be run through Ouroboros, provided that you have the appropriate badge. You do not need to have earned the badge before outleveling the contact to run it in Ouroboros. A level 50 can go back to Port Oakes, snare some pirates in the ghost traps at the fort, and then flashback to Veluta Lunata's arc if they should choose to.

My main, an arch/em blaster, holds the Rularuu bow in his magical pirate hook. It's silly, but cool.

Yep, the main reason to go SR over Shields defense-wise, assuming you have an unlimited budget and were going to IO the hell out of it, is that SR has ridiculous resistance to any defense debuffs. If you get up to 47% or so, you pretty much STAY there. Other sets have other fun toys, but for pure defense it's -really- hard to beat. It's also very simple - take everything up to (and possibly including) Elude, slot them for defense, and call it good.

A third shield-user (like the proposed fire/shield scrapper) would work very well for the melee-centric team. All four existing characters are most efficient when played right in the middle of the fray so they get the most out of Grant Cover, Fulcrum Shift, Transfusion, and the oodles of PBAoE attacks, and extra shield stacking would both increase the collective defense and melt plenty of faces.

Another interesting possibility could be a sonic/elec defender. It's a weird pairing, but it'd add lots of +/- resistance to the otherwise defense-oriented team, along with stacking short circuit with the blaster to completely sap all the enemies in the area on the opening volley.

I do not consider the Crey Pistol an attack, or even an immobilize, so much as I consider it a weapon-based emote or amusing coup-de-gras to land the killing blow on an archvillain by plinking it with the ice beam. It has truly negligible utility in just about any conceivable scenario. I still like it, because the accolade has a cool name, the pistol looks good, and it adds to my vast collection of temp-power weaponry.

The rank changes seem very unusual; I know that when you solo on Heroic most bosses get downgraded to LTs just like AVs get downgraded to EBs on small teams. One of my friends tried to convert a mission her had on test to live and a bunch of his custom characters got borked, but not much personal experience with that.

I CAN offer one big tip for making sure that special encounter enemies STAY as special encounters and do not accidentally mingle with the rest of the ordinary grunts, though. If they're just another boss in the custom faction, the game doesn't know that they shouldn't be a valid type to pull random bosses from, so create new enemy factions with only the desired custom enemies, and only use them as boss encounters (or guardians of some other objective or something).

Should you find yourself morally opposed to taking any of the sword powers, you can make a passable single target attack chain of Incinerate --> Scorch --> Cremate --> Scorch (repeat as needed) with Hasten and some recharge slotting in Incinerate, and hopefully some damage procs in Scorch. If you really invest in global recharge bonuses, you could eventually upgrade to Incinerate --> Cremate --> Scorch, which really isn't a bad chain aside from the investment. If you are also opposed to taking Breath of Fire, then your AoE will be limited to Blazing Aura / Burn / possible AoEs in your 40s.

That's... that's beautiful, Smurphy.

Grah. Stop reviving two year old threads.

There is nothing that the player can do to make One with the Shield come back any faster, but there is nothing the player NEEDS to do to make it come back in a reasonable time frame. For reference, a 'traditional' Tier 9 like Unstoppable comes back in a bit over 6 minutes after threeslotting for recharge and pretending that Hasten is up permanently. Twinked out +recharge IO builds (or Shield users with a horde of Kinetics friends) will lose out under this model, but under 'regular' conditions, just consider it as pre-slotted and immune to recharge debuffs.

Whoops.

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<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>Set Type Set name Slots Def % 1 Type 1 Def % 2 Type 2 Def % 3 Type 3
Acc Tohit Dbf Siphon Insight 5 3.75 Smash 3.75 Lethal 1.88 Neg
</pre><hr />

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Is that correct? I thought it was Smash/Lethal/Melee. It's listed as Negative instead of Melee.

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I'd say that's probably just a typo while copying it down; the line above it WAS //neg. If not, it'd be the one set that defies the new rules governing IO defense, for no particular reason.

Server: Virtue
Zone: N/A
Character Name: Revenant Hero v8
Time: earlier this afternoon (around 1)
Location: N/A
Mission: Synapse TF
Bug Description: Unwarranted diminishing returns on TF merits

From everything I have seen/read, I have been under the impression that the diminishing returns on TF merit rewards was supposed to happen for doing the same TF within 24 hours on the same character. However, my scrapper ran Positron Thursday afternoon and then Synapse this morning and seems to have been hit by DR on the Synapse reward (has 79 merits instead of 100+). If the point of the system was to encourage variety in the taskforces you run, then there should not be penalties for doing different tasks.

Necroposted again because it is WORTHY of it.

Revel in the madness.

Then go roll a REAL AR/Ice and massacre everything.

One note for further clarification - Shield Charge is a direct clone of Lightning Rod from Electrical Melee, and is identical in basically all aspects other than damage type (pure smashing vs. pure energy) and animation (Shield Charge has about half the animation time, but LR looks WAY cooler). From a straight damage-per-cast-cycle perspective it's crummy, but it can be one heck of a move.

Overall, I like to think of Shields as the defense equivalent of Fiery Aura. Alone, it has noticeably lower mitigation than most all of the other defense sets, but trades them for a number of other fun offensive / team-based tricks. It feels more dependent on pool picks (Tough/Weave/CJ/Aid Self) and/or set bonuses (positional defense is your friend) and/or other melee teammates who preferrably also have shields to really come into its own. If you want to roll up a new character to stand in front of Lord Recluse and spit in his face, Shields are probably probably not for you, but if you want a character that can dish out the hurt in tremendous style, give it a try. Shields are even less visually imposing than Willpower, as it has no visual effects on the character beyond the awesome-looking shield itself, except for a bluish glow for about two seconds when toggling up. A Shield scrapper (or tank or brute) is about the most "natural" guy possible to date.

Dark/Stone tank would be absolutely brutal on the stunning (and probably damage), but would be more brutal still on your endurance bar. In any case, it'd be able to keep a permanent mag 4 (boss strength) stun on everything in your immediate surroundings, with copious knockdown (not back) to spice things up.

As for the IO compatible hero planner, I highly recommend Mid's.

Very gutsy, and I can appreciate a good blaster's face-crushing potential, but there are some seriously screwy things in there. With that much recharge slotting, there is simply no need for so many attacks. There's especially no need to take Boxing AND Kick AND Flurry, especially when they are taken INSTEAD of Air Superiority, which is the most useful pool power attack in the game, because it does comparable damage but with an amazingly useful 100% knockdown. For someone attempting a 100% melee blaster, having lots of active mitigation (like AS) is a godsend, even if you do already have Power Thrust (since the enemies will pretty much never come at you one at a time). I would take AS, and MAYYYYBE Boxing, but the other two can go. You have heavy reduction slotting on all your (way better damage) /EM attacks and Hasten in the build already, so there is simply no need for so many weak filler attacks.

Also, no offense, but a lot of the slotting is completely crazy. I'm going to assume that you are either some sort of market-manipulating or farm-moar-behemoths billionaire, or that you raided Hami on a daily basis way-back-when, because all those HOs will come with a pretty hefty price tag. That aside, you have Superspeed three-slotted even though you can pretty much hit the runspeed cap with just one slot at level 50, you have Whirlwind six-slotted for reasons I can not fathom, you have boxing and kick and flurry all six-slotted, and yet you have only one slot in Total Focus, which does an order of magnitude more damage with a boss-level stun thrown in for kicks. You also have no endurance reduction in the whole build outside of the toggles (which are fairly cheap; attacks use up way way more endurance than toggles), yet you have 2 or 3 recharge in everything (even though you could make a seamless attack chain with half the attacks, given the slotting).

I'm sorry if that came off too harsh; I simply wanted to point out some of the more glaring points that had room for improvement. I can appreciate your daring and guts for trying to build a truly pure melee blaster, you just don't seem to have a clear grasp of how to build one effectively. You clearly have a build planner at your disposal; look at some of the actual recharge and damage numbers on your attacks when slotted up, and you should see that a lot of them are redundant in the extreme. If you do indeed somehow have the influence to get all the Nucleolus Exposures listed, your attacks would be sufficiently overslotted for accuracy that Tactics is completely redundant for everything short of Eluded scrappers (or stalkers or Cpt. Mako) or Nemesis troops under massively, massively stacked vengeance. You can drop the leadership line and grab Tough/Weave if you want the extra protection.

Another thing to consider, if you do indeed have the money to finance such a build (or at least the idle curiosity to imagine such builds) would be to use set IOs instead. If you're sixslotting your attacks anyway, you could get some much more interesting utility if you threw in some procs or set bonuses.